I had a couple of interactions over the last week that absolutely reinforced to me the need for “simplexity”.
The first occured with a client who I have been helping with a long and difficult piece of cultural change. The change is “transformational” in the truest sense of the word with pretty much every aspect of the organisation needing to change, from the type of work they do, to the structure, the leadership style etc. It is complex. There’s both a lot of change and it is difficult change. It’s hard for people who have been in an organisation for a long time to get their head around what is needed going forward. And yet, talking to an employee in this organisation, she made the point that at the heart of the very, very long and complex report generated, that many of the things that needed to change were actually very simple.
The second was a meeting with a new contact who was talking about multi factorial analysis of cultural change. And the level of detail and insight that this could provide. Very true of course. Great insights can come from proper statistical analysis, not superficial cause and effect type stuff.
Increasingly, however, I am realising that the real art is taking these very, very complex changes, these very detailed and sophisticated analyses and “translating” it into something that leaders, managers and employees can 1) understand and 2) do something about.
Daniel Montano has come up with the best definition I have found of Simplexity when he describes the general concept as
- simplicity layered on top of complexity;
- the synthesized idea that something can be simple AND complex at the same time; and
- the idea that both complexity and simplicity are needed in systems in order to improve the odds that the system and its end-users can be successful at achieving their goals
Back to my first example; one of the managers I have been working with on the project, literally put her head in her hands and pleaded “just tell me what to do. Don’t make me read a 100 page report. Don’t bamboozle me with consultant mumbo jumbo. Just tell me what to do.”
So this is it. Our job as advisor is to take the very complex and make it simple. Make it understandable. Make it actionable. Without losing the value that the complexity brings in the first place.
Simple, yes?
